Château

Nowadays, a château may be any stately residence built in a French style; the term is additionally often used for a winegrower's estate, especially in the Bordeaux region of France.

The French word château denotes buildings as diverse as a medieval fortress, a Renaissance palace and a fine 19th-century country house.

Most French châteaux are "palaces" or fine "country houses" rather than "castles", and for these, the word "château" is appropriate in English.

It is the personal (and usually hereditary) badge of a family that, with some official rank, locally represents the royal authority; thus, the word château often refers to the dwelling of a member of either the French nobility or royalty.

However, some fine châteaux, such as Vaux-le-Vicomte, were built by the essentially high-bourgeois—people but recently ennobled: tax-farmers and ministers of Louis XIII and his royal successors.

The open villas of Rome in the times of Pliny the Elder, Maecenas, and Emperor Tiberius began to be walled-in, and then fortified in the 3rd century AD, thus evolving to castellar "châteaux".

[6] In modern usage, a château retains some enclosures that are distant descendants of these fortifying outworks: a fenced, gated, closeable forecourt, perhaps a gatehouse or a keeper's lodge, and supporting outbuildings (stables, kitchens, breweries, bakeries, manservant quarters in the garçonnière).

Alternatively, due to its moderate climate, wine-growing soils and rich agricultural land, the Loire Valley is referred to as "The Garden of France".

Protected behind fine wrought iron double gates, the main block and its outbuildings (corps de logis), linked by balustrades, are ranged symmetrically around a dry paved and gravelled cour d'honneur.

When the château was built, Versailles was a country village; today, however, it is a wealthy suburb of Paris, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) southwest of the French capital.

The court of Versailles was the centre of political power in France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in October 1789 after the beginning of the French Revolution.